So if he’s not incompetent [i.e., Gomez took steps to get up to speed on the cases upon coming to LA], then the “brutal and painful reading” of these files didn’t happen this week. It didn’t happen last week, or last month. Gomez probably read these files almost two years ago, or at least started to, and it’s only now — when the courts forced their release — that Gomez finally publicly spoke out on this with such strength and imposed what sanctions he could on Cardinal Mahony.

Mahony:

When you [Gomez] were formally received as our Archbishop on May 26, 2010, you began to become aware of all that had been done here over the years for the protection of children and youth. You became our official Archbishop on March 1, 2011 and you were personally involved with the Compliance Audit of 2012—again, in which we were deemed to be in full compliance.

Not once over these past years did you ever raise any questions about our policies, practices, or procedures in dealing with the problem of clergy sexual misconduct involving minors.

[Note: the May 2010 date is when Gomez became the co-adjutor archbishop of LA, and the designated successor to Mahony. Over the next 10 months, Mahony still ran the archdiocese, as Gomez was getting up to speed and preparing to take over when Mahony officially retired in 2011.]

Nice to have my firm hunch confirmed by one of the witnesses to those days.

Now where Mahony and I part ways, of course, is whether Gomez should have acted at all.

Mahony’s letter carefully conflates two separate issues. He expresses remorse for engaging in what was then the standard procedure of removing priests suspected of abuse from ministry and referring them for treatment. He lamented that these treatments were not effective, and goes on to lay out all the steps they took to improve matters during the 90s and 2000s. Yes, says Mahony, we made mistakes in trying treatments that didn’t work, but we’ve learned from our mistakes.

What he does not address, however, are the steps he and his assistants took to keep these abusers out of sight from prosecutors and out of sight from parishioners. Concealing criminal behavior is different from attempting treatments that did not work. Funny, but Mahony doesn’t mention his acts to hide these crimes from view.

When a priest abuses a child, secrecy is a major part of the abuse. Sometimes it is done seductively, as the priest tells the child, “this is our special relationship, and part of what makes it special is that it has to be our secret. No one else has a relationship like this with me, but if you tell anyone, it will end.” Sometimes it is done abusively: “Don’t even think about telling anyone about this. I’m a respected priest, and someone who is this close to God, and you are just a child. They’ll believe me, and you’ll ruin your own reputation.”

Either way, the demands for silence prolong the abuse for the child who was abused. The abuse becomes not just What Happened on That Day, but an ongoing thing. Each day that silence weighs on the child. Each day, that silence prevents them from seeking and receiving help. Even if that priest never sexually approaches that child again, that silence eats away at the child every day, and the abuse continues.

When a bishop suspects or conclusively learns about the abuse, and then decides to “handle things” with complete secrecy, it only reinforces the abuse. Taking steps to provide counseling that in hindsight proved ineffective are one thing, but taking steps to keep crimes out of sight from the police and protecting the criminals who committed those crimes is something else. When a bishop takes steps to hide abusers from the police, the bishop becomes a collaborator in the evil done by the abuser.

Funny, but with all the bright shiny objects in Mahony’s letter, I must have missed the part where he explained that part of his behavior. As the LA Times notes at the top of their webpage dedicated to their coverage of this scandal,

More than five years after a civil settlement by the Los Angeles Archdiocese with more than 500 victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, a judge ordered the church to make confidential personnel files public. In the files, memos written by Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offered the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials to shield abusers from police.

Reading Mahony’s letter today only reinforces my suspicions that Gomez’s actions against Mahony were not driven by any sense of outrage, but rather are aimed at deflecting criticism of the archdiocese onto his predecessor. But insofar as Gomez kept silence until the courts forced disclosure — as Mahony says that Gomez has done — Gomez is as complicit as Mahony, and the actions to restrict Mahony’s public ministry are more window dressing for the public and less the product of disgust at Mahony’s conduct.

Mahony’s most damning sentence about Gomez deserves repeating: “Not once over these past years did you ever raise any questions about our policies, practices, or procedures in dealing with the problem of clergy sexual misconduct involving minors.”

Looks like you were right about that one. This whole controversy is so sad and unfortunate because it puts a sty onto the Catholic Church, and they really do some incredible charitable work. I do not know Canon Law at all, but I often wonder if priests should be allowed to marry. I don’t know if this would make a difference or not, but the profession seems to draw an over-representation of predator-types, in comparison with others. Then again, I could be wrong, just don’t know.

Their charitable work does not wipe out the harm that the Catholic Church has done for centuries. I will not give them a pass on women, children, or their ability to get money from the poorest among them. And they appear to have little shame or remorse.

The issue won’t be solved by allowing married clergy, because at its core, child sexual abuse is about power, not sex. As long as the clerical culture of the Catholic church, formed promotes an attitude of “the priest is always right,” problems like this will reoccur. When this culture is promoted and reinforced by the most reactionary elements of the church hierarchy, it makes things even worse.

Yes — and I’m sure John Giotti made some large charitable donations within his community, but that didn’t stop federal prosecutors from putting him away in SuperMax, which is where the “leaders” of this pedophile-protector deathcult belong.

Their untaxed activities, properly allocated to the jurisdictions that go without revenue for the privilege of their showy “good works” within, could administer all that charitable activity with much less overhead, without the criminality and anti-woman baggage that precedes them wherever they go.

Irene Favel describes in a [videoed] CBC interview (July 8, 2008) how she witnessed the murder of a baby by staff at the Muskowekwan Indian Residential School, run by the Roman Catholic Church in Lestock, Saskatchewan.

Our elected officials are quite sensitive to any and all centers of political power. Sometimes that power is wielded by money, and other times by the ability to produce votes and supporters.

Right now, those who approve of the bishops with regard to women’s health care and those who are scared of being the target of the bishops are united in pushing the views of the bishops on the rest of the nation. All too often, it seems their weight is more than the weight of those who are not afraid of opposing the bishops.

They remember what happened to Cardinal Bernard Law a decade ago. At the time, Law was one of the most powerful Cardinals in the US Catholic hierarchy, and (in the eyes of some/many/most in the USCCB) he might have ridden out the storm had he not been forced to testify in a secular setting about his ecclesiastical activities.

When Bishop Finn was indicted here in KC for failing to report suspicions of child abuse, he fought it right up until his case went to court. Then, at the last minute, his lawyers and the prosecution filed a stipulated set of facts (“We agree that this is the testimony that various witnesses would give in court, based on their depositions”) so that neither Finn nor others would have to testify. Finn pled not guilty, but the judge disagreed.

Looking back now, it sure appears that Finn feared testifying more than being found guilty.

Blech. At what point does the attempt to preserve the reputation of the Church become itself harmful to the reputation of the Church? Surely that point was passed a good while ago by now. The fact that the Catholic priesthood is riddled with sexual molesters hasn’t been a secret for ages. Why this continual charade of pretending that really there’s no problem? What on Earth do they think they’re gaining by this intransigence?